The Tankar Dawn

by Walt Popester

  Dagger recognized it, “That’s the Throne of Skyrgal.”

  “Wanted by the noble lords of Adramelech to accommodate the divine buttocks of their god,” Crowley confirmed. “The powerful hate the gods of light. They prefer those of darkness, because they hide their misdeeds.”

  “And they’re willing to raise wonderful structures in their honor. Assuming they’re not the ones dying with their necks in the yokes.”

  “Gods have nothing to do with it. It’s men. Men use gods against other men.”

  “Look at you.”

  “Right. Look at me.” The fossil forest turned Crowley’s voice into a sinister, cold laugh. “Every people, every individual, feels the instinctive call of happiness, of dawn, and light. He has the natural right to tear down every obstacle that stands on his path. Anticipating the Disciples by some centuries, someone realized that the pain of the last could be the source of a great power.”

  Dagger stopped in front of a familiar figure. “Holy shit.”

  Portrayed life-size, a Gorgor dressed in white sat on the ground with his legs crossed and his face obscured by a hood. Only his beard could be seen—short and black, it climbed the jaws of his chiseled face, exposing his chin and joining above his mouth.

  Behind him loomed the menacing brightness of the Hammer of Skyrgal at the Sanctuary. It was still whole, as it was before Baomani dug the Shadowthrone and the twelve armors of mayem.

  “It happened before the Red Dawn, before Skyrgal doomed Gorgors for all times,” Crowley whispered. “Two antipodal powers came to oppose, the earthly and the spiritual. For a moment every future seemed suspended on the will of a very talented Gorgor, and on how deeply he wanted to dig into the inviolate womb of Creation.”

  “I’ve seen this man,” Dag said.

  “You’re wrong, my son,” the voice in the darkness answered. “You wouldn’t last long in his presence. You’re face to face with the man who wanted to rid the world of the gods.” Crow’s voice seemed to come from everywhere in that maze of visions and fossil wood. “Can you imagine that, Dag? A world without gods.”

  A world without the nightmares man gave himself? “It would be a beautiful world.” He was not surprised when in the following panel he saw that Gorgor portrayed from the back, with his long white hair blowing in a glass wind. Dagger thought he could hear his scream crystallized in time. The Gorgor was raising his arms toward the huge crab before him, enclosed by an amorphis pyramidal structure towering against the fire-red sky.

  A bird with a thick green plumage was watching over the Gorgor from above.

  Hmm, Dag thought. In the following image Hanoi looked different than Dag had saw him. The crab was covered with gold leaves and adorned with bronze sculptures and precious stones. “Do you know his name?” Dagger asked, running his finger on the glassy face of the Gorgor he identified, beyond doubt, as the first Guardian of the river. He lowered his hand, and for the first time appeared his reflection, the distant, electric green glimmer of the Armor.

  “I know his name.” Ktisis was watching him beyond numerous panels.

  Dagger tried to follow him among the openings the dead forest was conceding him, but he soon got lost and had to walk back on his steps.

  “Once again you try to get to me, but fail. What is keeping us away?”

  “The barrier between the dignity and the squalor,” the boy answered. “The squalor of who keeps on crawling in the world of the living, to which he doesn’t belong anymore.”

  “How ungrateful. After all I’ve done for you,” the shadow said. “This is a world of gods playing mortals, and mortals improvising themselves as gods. It was inevitable that some, like me, remained trapped between life and death. Yet you don’t know how much I wanted you, how much I loved you, before Araya took care of the remains of my soul. He opened the mind of this ghost of the past on the absurdity of my addiction.”

  “Addiction to the blood of Skyrgal?”

  Through a ruby glass, Dag saw the distant Armor shake his head almost imperceptibly. “To the gods. To my desire to be as powerful as them. And I got to learn a very instructive story coming here, in one of the holiest place of my loyal children. The story of Khalifa, apostate king of the Gorgors.”

  So that’s his name. Dag touched again the lines of Khalifa’s bearded face. “Who was he?” And why did I meet him in the crab? Is he still there, or is it all a dream of mirrors?

  “Khalifa is the Holy Father of the Sanctuary who first dreamed the impossible,” Crowley said beyond the light. “To free the Gorgors and the world from the heavy yoke of Skyrgal. Don’t you think we all have a debt with him?”

  “I think he was just a lunatic, like every mortal who got his hands dirty with the power of the gods. Like you, for instance.” He closed his eyes and dug in his memories. The voice he had heard in his dream came to the surface. All those who’ve been inside me over the years have left a piece of themselves. The one I took from them.

  “This maze symbolizes the power, I think, the hard way to get to it and keep it,” Crowley said. “But what power are we talking about, here? Long before the Red Dawn, Khalifa took into this world the first anti-god, the one who was supposed to bring Skyrgal…” He didn’t continue.

  “Where?” Dagger asked. “Where?!”

  “Back,” the metallic voice ended. “To the other side.”

  That simple combination of words frightened him more than it should have. To the other side. Dag instinctively thought about the light he had seen beyond the sea before being swallowed by Hanoi and—but for a moment—he touched its meaning.

  The Divine continued, “The cult of Hanoi had a great success among the outcast and the misfits. It was their reward, their Redemption, the hope that one day the chains of absolute despotism could be broken.”

  “And when your men ask only for martyrdom to prove their loyalty, your power as a leader becomes unstoppable.”

  Crowley seemed to shake his head again. “You, at least you, should understand. Sometimes we would prefer to be martyrs, rather than feel like children fighting against the existence with paper swords.” There was a long silence, filled with the recall of a thousand memories. “That of Hanoi was a long forbidden worship. You may have noticed it in the many structures scattered everywhere in Adramelech. Dark crypts and underground tunnels, all in some way connected to Inherjer, the river flowing in the bowels of Candehel-mas. There was no mercy for the Gorgors surprised to worship him, or suspected to do so. Mortals forget. Only the ruins recall. It’s no surprise that Tankars have learned their macabre art here.”

  The artistic delirium paraded in front of Dagger: purple guts, and pain etched in the blue glass; red blood and yellow purulent fluids.

  “Public tortures are the biggest vileness,” the Divine said. “When a man is humiliated with the agony and the destruction of his body, he should have the benefit to be alone with his tormentor in a moment of due…intimacy. Why give him an audience? Why force him to scream under the complacent or disgusted eyes of the beholders?”

  “Are you talking about them or you?”

  “Am I talking about them, or you?” The deep laughter of Crowley echoed off in the distance, even though he seemed near. “But from the place where he had settled, Hanoi moved upstream with his appendices. Everywhere he went, a place of worship dedicated to him soon appeared. He was the river. He was Inherjer, and despite the harsh repression he gathered crowds of faithful.”

  “And where had he settled?”

  “Oh. You would never guess.”

  Between the next two fossilized trees, taller and wider than the previous, Dagger saw two wings of crowds exulting at the passage of Khalifa, sitting on a throne carried by six bearers. The green winged beast, the faithful cruachan, was still watching over him as his faithful held out their children to their savior.

  “Even though the cost of disobedience is death, a slave remains a slave only until he means to,” the Divine said without any inflection in his voice. “An
d he will let the powerful enslave his children only until he doesn’t see some sense in the craziest alternative. Khalifa exploited the extreme disobedience of his faithful to bring his cult to sunlight. No one wants a world without slaves, not even slaves themselves. The apostate king came to be tolerated and could celebrate his rites in public. He was the new world moving forward and his followers proclaimed him king of all Gorgors…”

  Dag stopped before the largest glass panel. Twice as high as the others, and at least six times as wide, it depicted Adramelech in flames.

  “…even of those who, however, realized they had every interest in defending their old god,” Crowley concluded.

  Gorgors killed Gorgors on the foreground, purple and ruby glass burning behind them.

  Above the glass panel were red glass letters on a black background, incomprehensible to him.

  “Who created a world like this, so full of blood and pain?” Crow translated. “Who created us like this?”

  Somewhere, some god was laughing.

  “War,” Dag only said.

  “Brother will kill brother, spilling blood on the holy land,” the Divine recited. “Khalifa had the worst of it and lost his battle, his dream and his people. At the end of that massacre, the Gorgors were again free to kneel before Skyrgal without any...external interference.”

  “Until Skyrgal showed how he cared for them the night of the Red Dawn, turning them into mindless shadows.”

  “History never lacked a subtle sense for sarcasm.”

  Dagger passed his finger on the metal rainbow silhouetted above the dead and the tortured. “A Gorgor king riding a giant crab into battle. You don’t see that every day.”

  “An anti-god is bonded like a dog to his master when he’s summoned. Within a short time, you might even find that out, judging from what I’ve heard around.”

  “What anti-god are you talking about?”

  “Not the one you’ve ridden this far.”

  My son, evoked by Baomani…Dagger closed his eyes. “Your Gorgors surely found out how hard it is to defeat them,” he answered, showing self-confidence. “I wonder how it happened, that time.”

  “I thought Angra told you one of the few noble pages of his life,” Crowley said. “The revenge against Skyrgal belonged to him and him alone. He would never let a filthy anti-god get in the way. Hanoi abandoned his nest and fled, taking that long, crazy journey to the sea, where he was reached and put to sleep. There he has been worshiped in secret for centuries by the few faithful who still remembered him, and continued to give him their children.” The fallen Pendracon paused. Then he softly sang, “I am the one to show you the way, salvation is in the fields. Listen up children and follow me, or you will pay the price of Hanoi.”

  “I’ve already heard those lines.” Dag thought it over. “Ianka. Ianka was singing them.”

  “Your little headless friend grew up at the orphanage of the Sanctuary. Who knows how many stories he told you about his childhood. It must have been even worse than the one you had because of me.”

  “Stop it.”

  “The fields,” the Divine continued. “This place has never had another name. It’s boundless and lifeless, but I can easily see why Khalifa could evoke such an anti-god only here.”

  “Don’t tell me. Has it something to do with the fucking immense amorphis arc just out here?”

  “Hard not to notice it, right? Just like the giant crabs that lived in this part of the world. Only one of them could hold his negative energy.” The Divine sighed, a deep vibration in the metal. “A long gone people, forever entrusted to the memory of the sands. They all died because of the Red Dawn but that…that’s another story.”

  Why is he telling me all this, now? Dagger thought. “You’re trying to tell me something.”

  “I’ve always tried to tell you something.”

  If I saw Khalifa inside the damn crab, that means…“What happened to Khalifa?”

  “Oh, his body was never found. Perhaps his skeleton is still lying in the dust, somewhere in this immeasurable nothing. Certainly it’s hard to understand how big and deep his burial is. Khalifa was the first Guardian of the river, but others came after him, and that prohibited cult has survived to the present days among the Tankars. And not only them.”

  All those who’ve been inside me over the years have left a piece of themselves. Dagger shook his head. Passing his forefinger on the contour of flames and agonizing faces once again, he realized that only a last semitransparent barrier separated him from Crowley. The fallen Pendracon was in the room just beyond.

  He was still. Motionless.

  There was a break in the middle of the panel, a little further.

  “It was good to chat for a while, don’t you think?” the Divine said.

  “Yes. You’re becoming even more talkative than usual.” Dagger slowly walked. “So, what do you want to talk about now, Dad? The time you told me to look for the Hermit?”

  “You’re making the same mistake over again, just a little bigger this time,” the Armor suspended in a shower of reflections answered. “Trusting the outstretched hand in the dark.”

  “Someone deader than you already tried to warn me.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  Dagger brushed again the cold glass flames. “The only thing the agent Orange cared about was bringing here the Cry of Mankind. He died for this,” he informed Crowley. “How could you—”

  “I trusted Araya. I’ve always trusted Araya, even when I was…” He broke off.

  “Alive?”

  “On my feet,” Crowley preferred to say. “Araya allowed himself an instant of fatal weakness and ended up dragging all of us to the bottom with him. The good, the bad…and all the middle ways.” He shook his head. “I can understand that. You spend your life keeping your guard high against the whole world and sooner or later you feel the need to lower it. What better occasion to do that if not with your son, the blood of your blood? That was the only possible breach in the defenses with which Araya surrounded himself, his open flank.”

  “And Korkore broke into it. You should have seen the memories trapped inside that Hammer.”

  “Hammer?”

  “Oh, never mind. Korkore educated Mumakil’s children to hate in the depths of the Fortress.” He thought about it. “And now I don’t even wonder why. He wanted to resume the project of Khalifa and continue. A world without gods, wasn’t it?”

  Crow seemed to reason about it. “To take his revenge on Skyrgal, who had reduced the Disciples to immortal human larvae.” He remained silent for a moment. “It makes sense. Now that Orange has died, Baomani has inherited his mantle. And he will bring the Beast in this world, if you continue to help anyone who deserves your easy trust.”

  “Sorry to be rude, but I’m not the one locked up half dead in a tin box.”

  The silence which followed reminded Dagger he was alone in a hostile place. However, he moved a step toward the low opening that would lead him to Crowley, unable to deny himself that umpteenth clash with truth.

  “You’re a little hell-bent creature, Dag. You’ve always been,” the shadow warned him. “Your only goal now should be to keep away from those who want to get their hands on you.”

  “I didn’t travel all these miles across the ruins just to talk with you.” Dagger tightened his hold on the hilt of his sword. “To tell the truth, I think some minor figures should be taken out from time to time.”

  “You hurt me.” A sharp, metallic noise accompanied Crow’s voice. “But remember. Sometimes it’s the minor figures, those who remain on the background, who ensure the most brilliant twists in mortal existence.”

  Dag bent to slip into the opening at the base of the panel. When he stood again, he found himself in a room lit by a row of seven torches on the bottom wall, and seven above them. There was no other adornment, except for the white furs covering the floor. That exhibition of light must have some symbolic value, he thought, at least for the few Gorgors who were
allowed to penetrate into the heart of the fossil forest to kneel and communicate with their leper messiah.

  They are here, too, Dag thought. The shadows were silently watching him, safe in the protective hug of the dark. And they were hostile.

  Crowley sat on a humble petrified wooden throne, wearing the mayem Armor shaped in Ktisis’ appearance.

  Manegarm whispered against leather as Dagger drew Solitude, and advanced.

  “What do you mean to do, kill me for the…third, fourth time?” Crowley said mockingly. “Don’t provoke me. I’m no longer the innocent creature groping in the darkness of that crypt.”

  “Me neither.” The boy paused. “Must it end like this, Crow?”

  “You must do something,” the Armor said. “We have no control over the events that shake our lives. The sooner you understand this, the less severe eternal life will be to you.”

  “I’ll never have a fate like yours. The shell of a man a god preserved for a thousand ages.”

  Crow tilted his head forward and stared at him. “What can you do…someone has re-opened the gates of my hell, and I’ve struck from the grave!” He sprang to his feet.

  Dagger immediately resorted to the temporal control. Concentrate! he thought, trying to isolate himself from the world. Gone were the mortals’ distant cries of pain, the beasts in the forest, the world that lived and died every day out of him.

  Now! He felt the energy of the void spring from his broken skin.

  The fire of the torches burned more slowly and the being in the Armor slowed his run, a hvis scimitar already in his right hand. Crowley advanced a little more, until the last metal step echoed beneath the glass and stone ceiling.

  Dagger looked up and watched him. Did I do it? In the light of the still fire, he approached the Armor and stared at it. He saw the reflections of the frozen flames on the metallic cheekbones, the horrific shiny mask concealing a havoc face. You look so…